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About us

Jamie Crawford

The GuestHouse Storytellers is one of the most successful storytelling clubs in the country. We are a non-profit organisation run by a committee of volunteers.

The club meets on the second Tuesday of every month (except July and August) at The Hillcrest Centre in Newhaven. We have no registered membership; everyone is welcome and you become a member by attending. To find out about upcoming events you can register for our newsletter.

Most evenings are club evenings, where anyone may book a slot to tell a ten minute story on whatever theme has been chosen for that month. Tellers vary from the very well trained and experienced to people stepping into the water for the first time. Everyone is welcome and every story and teller is different, providing a varied and rich feast of tales to carry away with you and maybe even retell.

Three times a year we have professional tellers. We have hosted some of the top storytellers in the country – Hugh Lupton, Sally Pomme Clayton, June Peters, the Dacres, Ashley Ramsden, Xanthe Gresham, Roi Gal-or and many others.Every summer we hold an event at the Lifeboat Station in Newhaven to raise money for the RNLI. We are grateful to Newhaven Town Council for giving us funding to cover expenses so we have been able to donate the entire ticket price to the lifeboat.

Our History

In 2006 a group of us did a course in storytelling at the University of Sussex and discovered an art form that we had no idea still existed.

Afterwards we wanted to go on telling and listening to stories so we continued to meet, then bring friends along, and gradually we evolved into The GuestHouse Storytellers club. We chose the name from a poem by the 12th century Persian mystic, Rumi, which you can read here: http://www.gratefulness.org/poetry/guest_house.htm